The man suspected of driving a vehicle loaded with improvised explosive devices into the Multnomah Athletic Club early Saturday had a history of threatening members of the social club.

Family members confirmed to OPB that Bruce Valentine Whitman was the driver who died inside a rental vehicle that crashed through the glass windows of the MAC building. According to police, the vehicle drove around the club’s ground floor as the driver attempted to set off explosions. Most of them failed to detonate. Whitman, 48, died in the car after it went up in flames.

As far back as 2022, Whitman threatened to destroy the MAC and showed up at the homes of six different members, according to Multnomah County Circuit Court records.

“Whitman threatened to kill one member’s neighbor, threatened to kill a different member and told them he was going to burn down the MAC, and told another member he was there to murder the member,” Portland Police Officer Michael Hansen wrote in a June 15, 2022, petition ordering Whitman to surrender deadly weapons.

Oregon’s red flag law went into effect in 2018. It enables family members, roommates and law enforcement to petition the court to “remove a weapon, or a concealed handgun license, from an individual who is at risk for suicide or is a danger to others.”

Whitman’s history was previously reported by The Oregonian.

Whitman looked for MAC stickers on vehicles around Portland and would confront members in their cars. During an incident May 24, 2022, Whitman drove alongside another car driven by a woman who was a MAC member and flagged her down.

“After she stopped to see what he wanted Whitman yelled insults at the member and told her ‘I am going to kill you,’” Hansen wrote in the petition.

Portland Police first received a referral regarding Whitman in early 2021. Hansen wrote in that same petition that Whitman believed people at the MAC were “involved in a campaign of harassment and wanting to cause him physical harm.”

Police did not find Whitman’s concerns valid.

“Whitman has accused police officers and crisis responders of being sent by the MAC to harass him when they have had contact with him,” Hansen wrote.

“That’s just what his mind believed,” Rita Lenzer, Whitman’s mother, told OPB during an interview Sunday. “He just couldn’t leave it alone. It’s something he couldn’t let go.”

Whitman worked as a bartender at the MAC before he was fired. The threats were so serious that the club’s security shared its concerns with members. In June of 2022, they informed members in an email that his verbal threats had “escalated” and that Whitman had been “detained by the Portland Police on a psychiatric hold awaiting further evaluation.”

During a separate incident Jan. 29, 2022, Whitman threatened his brother Jason Erickson at a restaurant after a family funeral in Corvallis.

Erickson told police he thought Whitman may have been under the influence of drugs or intoxicated when Whitman held a steak knife to his throat and said: “‘Don’t ever talk to me again … if I see you again I will kill you,’” according to court documents.

Whitman was arrested in 1999 for misdemeanor battery in Boise, Idaho, but the case was dismissed, court records show.

On February 16, 2026, Whitman attempted to kill himself. He was subsequently admitted to Unity Center for Behavioral Health in Portland. Police filed another extreme risk protection order and Whitman surrendered two firearms, a 9 mm and a .38 special revolver.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2026/05/04/court-records-multnomah-athletic-club-attack-suspect-history/